Facebook loses the battle in India

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), has ruled in the case of Free Basics, Facebook’s free internet access service that provides users with a few of the social network’s own pages.

The ruling leaves no room for doubt about the TRAI’s position:

“No service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content.”

In the meantime, the body has blocked Free Basics in India.

This is a major defeat for Facebook, and one that it should have known it never stood a chance of winning. From the moment it was launched, Free Basics sparked opposition from India’s technology community, which described the service as misleading and profoundly defective and contrary to the basic principles of net neutrality.

India is not just any old market. What’s more, its history explains why it would reject an offer of free, but very limited connectivity: once part of the British empire, India takes its independence very seriously and isn’t about to be treated like some third world non-entity along the lines of “some internet is better than no internet.” What’s more, anti-imperialist cyberactivists in the sub-continent have garnered some heavyweight support from bodies such as the World Wide Web Foundation, founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who has welcomed the TRAI’s decision.

And it’s not just the Indian regulators who are angry about Facebook’s offer of access to news, the weather and a couple of free pages; Indians themselves have voiced their rejection en masse. In short, Facebook got this very badly wrong, spending millions of dollars on an advertising campaign featuring a rural farmer called Ganesh, as well as an open letter written by Zuckerberg published in The Times of India. All to no avail: this was a lose-lose situation for Facebook, whatever the outcome.

Undaunted, Facebook has battled on, calling on Indians who support Free Basics to write to the regulator, while Zuckerberg has written another letter, this time outlining his arguments as to why the TRAI is wrong.

But the lesson Facebook seems to have failed to understand is that the first rule of the internet is that it should be the internet, the whole internet, and nothing but the internet. Users must be able to decide what they view online.

Being poor should not mean that access to the internet is filtered by a third party. India’s entrepreneurs and tech community are absolutely right in demanding the same internet neutrality that their US counterparts enjoy. It is astonishing that Facebook has so signally failed to understand such a basic premise or to understand that its offer would be seen as an insult. Instead of rectifying, it has blundered on, trying to depict the situation as an overreaction, insisting on its good intentions.

Facebook offers Free Basics to more than 19 million people in 38 countries through a range of initiatives on Internet.org. Will India’s resounding no thank you oblige Facebook to rethink its policies and offer the poor full access to the internet, or will it toughen its stance that zero-rating is the only way for developing countries?

(En español, aquí)